25: The Name Game

In the past, Pawley would go straight to the top to argue his position to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower when he felt that his dealings with underlings were not going well. But in the new Kennedy administration, he did not have that access, so he had to take his case to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann (photo), whom weeks earlier Pawley had praised as “brilliant” and no “nicer fellow” while chastising him for his friendship with Betancourt.1

Pawley in early March 1961 began sending Mann materials to make the case against Manuel “Manolo” Ray and for the use of others.2 Ray was a former professor of engineering at the University of Habana, who had been selected by the CIA to rally support. Pawley disliked him because he had served as Castro’s Minister of Public Works, although he quit the Castro cabinet position after his friend Huber Matos was arrested by Castro. Ray then defected to the U.S. and became the leader of the anti-Castro counterforce People’s Revolutionary Movement (MRP).3

In the letter to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann, Pawley demonstrated his mastery of the Cuban situation while raising the possibility of a post-Castro civil war if the wrong leaders are selected. “It [is] also thought by important Cubans whom I know here that Ray and three or four of the other prominently mentioned Cubans have already made arrangements through Russian agents and that when Castro falls, Russia will still have their men in power even though they pretend to demonstrate a more friendly attitude toward the United States.” Pawley stated “that the best solution would be a ‘junta’ or ‘frente’ made up of leaders of the various political groups. At no time has this seemed more necessary than now.” He offered four names for this role: de Varona, Carillo, Artime, and Maceo.

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26: Days of Swine and Rose's Boys: Bay of Pigs Invasion

Fear of retaliation was a concern as the CIA planned the demise of two Western Hemisphere leaders, Castro and Trujillo. According to the CIA’s Deputy Director for Support, Col. L.K. White, on March 22, 1961, the CIA’s Sheffield Edwards and Jack Earman met with CIA Deputy Director General Charles Cabell “to point out to them that we were not furnishing the Director the personal protection which we should be furnishing in these critical times.”1

On April 4, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president whose mother, Rose, prayed the rosary throughout his life, heard about the “immorality” of an invasion of Cuba voiced by Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While Fulbright “denounced the proposition out of hand,” Adolphe Berle declared his belief that “a ‘power confrontation’ with Communism in the Western Hemisphere was inevitable.” Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas C. Mann, “who previously had been on the fence, now spoke up for the operation.”2 Rose’s son’s march toward disaster proceeded headlong with the momentum created by Pawley-intelligence-exile axis.

Pawley on April 15th sat down with FBI agents Leman L. Stafford, Jr. and George E. Davis, Jr. for an interview that Pawley had requested. He let them know he was “a personal friend of the Director of the FBI, as well as of President Eisenhower, former President Truman and many other influential people in the United States and Latin America.” Pawley then voiced “that he is deeply concerned about the communist trend in Cuba and its effects on other Latin American countries, and that he has been in close contact with the U.S. State Department and the CIA relative to the situation.”3

Manuel Ray Rivero “took the view that the internal resistance was so strong that Castro could be overthrown without an ‘invasion’ from the outside.” (In truth, there was only insignificant damage from the 110 insurgent bombings between October 1960 and April 17, 1961,4 when Jose A. Perez “Pepe” San Roman led the Bay of Pigs invasion.)5

Ray’s wishy-washy stance on the need for an invasion did not sit well with Pawley, and in the weeks before the invasion Ray complained that assertions that he favored Cuba maintaining relations with the U.S.S.R. “were not true and part of a ‘campaign against him by Mr. Pawley of the Miami City Transit Company.’”6

Despite the desire to make it look like a Cuban led invasion, among the first men ashore were two non-Cubans, Grayston L. Lynch (aka Gray) and William “Rip” Robertson, who had been among those suggested as possible assassins of Castro. Lynch, a fearless veteran of the D-Day invasion at Normandy Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and Heartbreak Ridge in Korea, would survive the debacle at the Bay of Pigs and go on to direct and participate in hundreds of more clandestine operations against Cuba. A decade before dying in 2008, Lynch published his account of the invasion imbued with anger at the failure of the Kennedy Administration to provide the essential air cover titled Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs. Rip Robertson’s passion for adventure ended a decade later when he “died in 1973 of malaria in Laos.”7

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